STUPIDITYEveryone loves stupidity. Even stupid people laugh at stupid jokes. It's because we all think everyone else is stupid except us. Stupid and ignorant jokes are probably the most universal form of entertainment.

PAINAlmost all men love pain - as long as it's someone else's pain. Not al women think pain is funny for some reason.

FUNNY LOOKING THINGSYou can have pain and stupidity in other mediums. Cartoons should be drawn funny. Do Martin's drawings are always funny. They would be funny as still images even if you didn't know the context.

I don't understand cartoons that don't try to make each image funny.

ABSURDITYCartoons can do absurdity better than any other medium. Don Martin is a genius at it.

BTW, people are still sending me their studies of comic book covers, but most of you are tracing the covers instead of drawing them. Drawing them will make you try to control the concepts. Tracing is cheating. If you wanna trace one just to figure it out - and then draw one freehand, that might make sense.

I'm actually hard-pressed to name any cartoons where every image is funny. Even Clampett's have a lot of just straightforward, solid, effective drawings that build to something else. Frankly I think concentrating on making every single drawing funny can have it's consequences too. Bad construction slips through. Some of the early "cheater" episodes (as you called them yourself) of R&S had Stimpy looking excessively cock-eyed for minutes on end, as if that's what was actually on the model sheet! I can't watch those without wondering how Stimpy isn't bumping into everything in his path!

My pain theory: if stupidity and absurdity cause pain, then pain is funny because it entails either or both, in many situations. Men rarely feel extreme pain for any reason that doesn't relate to those two basic reasons. Women, on the other hand, regularly feel physical pain for reasons which are not the result of their intelligence on way or the other, AND which are the result not of absurdity, but logic made manifest - that is, evolutionary biology. They learn from an early age to grin and bear it and NEVER complain because guys will hit you for it, even though they're not supposed to. So it's a systematic AND purposelful part of their lives, which makes it much harder to laugh at.Am I right, girls?

When anime was still cartoony you could usually find even some unintentionally funny looking characters. Nowadays most humor is done verbally rather than just having a character make an amusing expression and unfortunaly alot of our newer actors don't look too amusing either aside from Ian McDiarmid (The Emporer from Star Wars) who dosen't really even have to try to look funny, just watch him in a fight as Palepetine and he makes goofy faces left and right when they're supposed to be serious.

What I think is also great about those Don Martin standalone paperbacks, is that they are one of the few examples of Mad product during Feldsteins reign that did not have that horrible machine lettering (which worked much better in black and white than it did in the color horror and sci fi comics usually)

That machine lettering also led to writing and drawing oftentimes being totally divorced from each other, Mad playing the copywriter and illustrators game instead of the Cartoonist game.